Guest Post by my Pop: A Response to "Recent Heroics and Impressive Charts and Graphs"

Pop taking a photo.
He's taken thousands of photos but no one has ever seen any of them.

On Apr 23, 2016, at 11:46 PM, -Pop- wrote:

I liked your blog. I was able to relate to your counting, felt like the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Well first, if in 2013 you listened to 33000 songs, and if each song was 3 min, it would consume over 68 full days, or if you slept 6 hrs/d, it would be 84 days of non-sleeping time or almost 1/4 of your waking-time listening to music. Wow, that’s a lot of music.

As for visiting 378 drinking establishments since 2010, the summer I drove a cab in Allentown I too counted my drinking estm’ts visited picking up customers. I got to, if my memory correctly serves me, in the neighborhood of 110.

I never did count total museums(a great idea) but did do several tallies on some of our trips. It really makes me wonder what my lifetime museum/historical societies would be.

I don’t know if you remembered the story about when we worked in Alaska and had to fly in all our food for 4-months. Mom wondered how much we would eat in over 120 days, but I knew exactly how much cereal I ate, because I had kept track. So sometimes what seems like idle tallying becomes quite meaningful.

A super job of counting life’s highlights. It makes it all seem so much more consequential when you know for sure how many miles you ran, the number of songs you listened to, how many boxes of cereals you ate, how many milk cartons you opened or how many museums you visited.

editor's note: For further reading to confirm, without a shadow of a doubt, that I turned out pretty well considering my OCD DNA situation, pls see:

And lastly, upon further discussion, Pop told me, "We went out to dinner last night with our friends and your mom said that you made up the number of drinking establishments you'd gone to. (Pause for a mutual gasp.) I know! Don't worry, I defended your honor. It's unthinkable to suggest you didn't have the data to support your totals."